Six months ago, Pete Hegseth’s nomination to lead the Defense Department was very nearly defeated. Three Senate Republicans had decided to reject the scandal-plagued former Fox News host, and if they were joined by one more GOP member, Donald Trump’s choice to lead the Pentagon would’ve failed.
Sen. Thom Tillis was poised to be that fourth Republican vote — right until the North Carolina caved under partisan pressure the day before the vote.
After Tillis announced that he’d retire at the end of his current term, the senator felt freer to speak his mind, and he said earlier this month that Hegseth appeared “out of his depth” in his Cabinet position.
The GOP lawmaker is hardly the only one who’s noticed. The New York Times reported late last week on the growing tensions between the beleaguered secretary and U.S. military leaders, noting that Hegseth’s “insistence on absolute loyalty, backed with repeated threats of polygraphs,” has contributed to “uncertainty and mistrust” that is undermining the armed forces’ readiness and effectiveness.
By some accounts, the secretary doesn’t appear to be overly popular with the White House, either. The Washington Post reported:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s use of polygraph tests to search for people leaking information to the news media was stopped at the direction of the White House after a senior adviser to Hegseth raised alarm to senior officials there about being targeted, U.S. officials and others familiar with the matter said.
According to the Post’s reporting, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, Hegseth and his team had already carried out several polygraph tests, prompting complaints from Patrick Weaver, one of the secretary’s senior advisers.
But Weaver didn’t just take his concerns to Hegseth — he went over Hegseth’s head and complained to the White House, which intervened and ended the secretary’s tactics.
The Post’s report comes a month after NBC News reported that the Defense Department has struggled to fill key vacancies in Pentagon offices in part because “the White House has rejected some people Hegseth wants to hire.” And about a week ago, Politico reported that Hegseth backed Army Lt. Gen. Richard Angle to serve as the new director of the National Security Agency and head of U.S. Cyber Command, but the White House balked at the secretary’s choice. In recent months, there have been a great many questions about whether Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is actually making decisions at his department, with Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington suggesting during one recent hearing that RFK Jr. might not be the one “making decisions” at HHS. The more we’re confronted with related reporting about Hegseth, the more similar questions come to the fore about who’s calling the shots at the Pentagon.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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